Archive for ‘male violence’

Article I of III: Taking into account the imprint of devastation on our collectives.

What took me to write this series on sisterhood is a situation of emergency, in which our solidarity and collective resistances are continually under threat or sabotaged by the rifts men have created in ourselves and between ourselves.[1] Men not only attack us externally but corrode us deeply from the inside so we fissure internally and then displace the violence onto ourselves and other women.[2] This way men make sure we never have the strength and cohesiveness to build a viable alternative to their necrophiliac system, so we don’t become solid enough to put their war to an end – let alone have the material capacity to do so. Although this issue is as old as men’s rule over women, the amnesia, genocide and erasure of women[3] means that the emergency seems to be as new today as it was yesterday: with much despair, I have seen collective after collective bitterly imploding, being infiltrated or taken down by those robotically defending men’s war against us.

What happens when men finally realize they can no longer suppress women’s speech? When their counter-arguments prove to be unsubstantiated and factually incorrect? When they’re forced to accept that nobody takes the word “misandry” seriously, because while “misogyny” evokes the horrors of witch-burnings, female genital mutilation, honor killings, suttee, forced lobotomies and Chinese foot-binding, “misandry” only manages to evoke the image of an overweight white dude who hates his ex-wife and gets off on punching his perceived grievances into a keyboard…?

As is often the case with misogynists and anti-feminists, the trans horde that took advantage of the “inclusivity” (read: a transwoman helped organize the march, and woe be unto anyone who crosses men who demand access to woman-only space in general) of NYC Dyke March — and others who weren’t even there — don’t seem to have read a word of anything Sheila Jeffreys has actually written. If they had read her, how could it have rationally been said that Jeffreys — a pro-female, pro-lesbian writer — and her work had no place at a lesbian-centered event?

Or, perhaps they read a couple of words, saw something they didn’t like, and threw away the rest? “The rest” being Sheila Jeffreys’s entire life’s work of pro-female, pro-lesbian, PIV-critical radical feminist analysis which spans decades and examines women’s lives from pre-WWI — a body of work from which modern women can draw many parallels, recognize obvious patterns in how women are oppressed by men over time, and call age-old bullshit when we see it, because we are never, ever allowed to see it. Women’s history is routinely erased, and this is a deliberate political strategy to keep women as ignorant of patriarchal context and as oppressed — and as complicit in our own oppression — as possible.

The latest slogan of the trans activists is ‘my feminism will be intersectional or it will be bull shit’. The current trans obsession with intersectionality is a major cause for concern, and a trans co-option of intersectional theory could have disastrous consequences for the political struggles of all subordinate groups.

Trans activists are co-opting political movements and the ultimate trans agenda is to remove the rights of all subordinate groups to self-determination and movements for liberation. I do not believe that most individuals who identify as trans or their allies are consciously planning the depoliticisation of class based oppressions. Trans is a structural and colonising tactic – a tool of the patriarchy, but if you buy into trans theory, that is what you are buying into.

Big Porn Inc is a book of articles on pornography, many of which are written from a radical feminist perspective. The book was edited by two well known Australian feminists Abigail Bray and Melinda Tankard Reist and published by Spinifex Press. This post is my personal reaction to reading this book. Please be advised that this post contains graphic descriptions of rape.

A culture of homosexual group sex has been exposed with recent allegations of ‘sexual abuse’ by some retired fire fighters against their colleagues. These allegations have given rise to a debate on the nature of consent within group sex between men. Some sources have jumped to immediate conclusions on the matter, blaring headlines such as “Brutal Abuse Exposed” (Cover of The Sunday Telegraph, Sunday 14th February). However the issue is far more complicated than that.

We need to take into consideration several important points before we make such spurious judgment on the nature of this so called ‘abuse’.

Today, Malawian women protested after several women were brutally beaten and stripped naked by male street vendors for the offense of not-wearing-dresses in public.

Street vendors accused women of defying cultural norms and attacked them this week in Lilongwe and Blantyre, two of the nation’s largest cosmopolitan centers.

“They beat them up and stripped them naked, claiming they did not follow the tradition,” said Seodi White, a rights activist and protest organizer. “Attacking women in trousers is an outrage. We are a democracy, they’re taking us back to the dark ages.”

Protesters wore pants, miniskirts and leggings in a show of solidarity as they gathered to condemn the attacks.

While this protest may (or may not) evoke familiar imagery from last summer’s “SlutWalk” protests, unlike SlutWalk, this protest sticks to the issues, and makes it clear what they are getting at. Importantly, these women actually name the agent of harm: men, attacking women, out of contempt for women.

Not so long ago, I read about the child sex abuse scandal at Penn State, and the ensuing firing and arrests of men heralded as leaders of a community for decades, and a flurry of news articles like this one at Huffpost about the ongoing ‘Crisis of Masculinity’. Poor dudes.

To be honest, I never thought too much about bloke stuff before, not since that day walking home from school, I found my 15 year old baby brother squared off against a bunch of other boys, all reeking that feral pubescent testosterone gymclass odour after footy training.

Strong enough to peel your nail-polish and melt your mascara. Really. A lot of ballet position postures and gestures, but with snarling, drooling, and bared frothy canines between the bum-fluff. When I asked what was going on, my brother told me to bugger off, as it was “guy stuff”, and not to tell mum if I knew what was good for me.